Abstract
In this paper we will argue that the nature of dogwhistle communication is essentially dialogical, and that to account for dogwhistle meaning we must consider dialogical events in which dialogue partners can draw different conclusions based on communicative events. This leads us to a theory based on inference. However, as identified by Khoo (2017) and emphasised by Henderson & McCready (2018), a problematic aspect of this approach is that expressions that have a similar meaning are analysed as generating the same dogwhistle inferences, which appears not always to be the case. By modelling meaning in terms of intensional types in TTR, we avoid this problem.- Anthology ID:
- 2021.reinact-1.6
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the Reasoning and Interaction Conference (ReInAct 2021)
- Month:
- October
- Year:
- 2021
- Address:
- Gothenburg, Sweden
- Editors:
- Christine Howes, Simon Dobnik, Ellen Breitholtz, Stergios Chatzikyriakidis
- Venue:
- ReInAct
- SIG:
- SIGSEM
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 40–46
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2021.reinact-1.6
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Ellen Breitholtz and Robin Cooper. 2021. Dogwhistles as Inferences in Interaction. In Proceedings of the Reasoning and Interaction Conference (ReInAct 2021), pages 40–46, Gothenburg, Sweden. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Dogwhistles as Inferences in Interaction (Breitholtz & Cooper, ReInAct 2021)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2021.reinact-1.6.pdf